SCO CEO Fires First Shot At Open Source, GPL As Copyright Case Nears
While the embattled Unix company is set to face-off against IBM tomorrow in a Utah court on a discovery matter, its CEO broadly distributed the foundation paper on Thursday to outline SCO's right to file a lawsuit against a Linux user based on U.S. Copyright Law and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
As if on the stand, McBride stated his case in no uncertain terms. "The GPL, under which Linux is distributed, violates the United States Constitution and the U.S. copyright and patent laws," he said in the letter.
Opponents view the letter as evidence of SCO's longheld intention to derail the General Public License under which Linux is freely distributed.
In an interview with CRN, McBride acknowledged that the company's plan to file a major copyright-infringement case against a Linux customer motivated the release of the letter, which he said provides a legal foundation for the case. His letter also was precipitated by the release of an Open Source Development Lab (ODSL) paper dubbed, "SCO: Without Fear and Without Research," written by Columbia University Law Professor Eben Moglen. SCO's letter today was in part a response to that paper, McBride said.
In spite of the rhetoric, the letter was the first shot heard round the world in what is likely to be a multiyear battle that will shape future U.S. copyright and patent laws.
SCO's claims are not without legal merit, McBride asserts. He cites a recent U.S. Supreme Court case, Eldred v. Ashcroft, in which the arguments reportedly similar to those advanced by the open-source movement were tossed out by the U.S. Supreme Court.
But many in the open-source community claim SCO's charges against IBM and others are baseless and that the company is attempting to hijack the legal system to drive up its stock price and revenues.
In his letter, McBride charges the Free Software Foundation and Red Hat with trying to undermine U.S. copyright laws. Red Hat would not comment.
On Thursday, Moglen, the Columbia University law professor who wrote the paper for the OSDL, and a member of the Free Software Foundation, said SCO has no copyright case, either. "As an amateur scholar of constitutional law, Mr. McBride is longer than he is deep," Moglen said, noting that he is working on a formal response to McBride's letter.
"There are a group of software developers in the United States, and other parts of the world, that do not believe in the approach to copyright protection mandated by Congress," McBride wrote in the letter, which was e-mailed broadly to participants in the technology industry. "In the past 20 years, the Free Software Foundation and others in the open source software movement have set out to actively and intentionally undermine the U.S. and European systems of copyrights and patents. The Leaders of the FSF... have enforced the provisions of the GPL as part of a deeply held belief in the need to undermine or eliminate software patent and copyright laws."
In his letter, McBride took serious aim at Red Hat and all companies that adhere to the GPL. "Red Hat has aggressively lobbied Congress to eliminate software patents and copyrights," McBride charged. Red Hat would not comment on SCO's claims.
McBride also said in his statement that the company is undeterred in it mission to preserve its Unix ownership rights in spite of verbal attacks and personal threats allegedly made against company executives.
"SCO believes that copyright and patent laws adopted by the United States Congress and the European Union are critical to the further growth and development of the $186 billion global software industry, and to the technology business in general," McBride wrote. "The future of the global economy is in the balance.
"In taking this position SCO has been attacked by Free Software Foundation, Red Hat and many software developers who support their efforts to eliminate software patents and copyrights."
Despite the "raw emotions," McBride continued, the issues break down into two camps: those who support copyrights and ownership of intellectual property, and those who support free ownership of intellectual property envisioned by the Free Software Foundation, Red Hat and others.
After the paper was distributed, McBride told CRN that it was IBM -- not SCO -- that forced the GPL to the legal microscope.
"IBM put the GPL on the table" three months ago as part of its defense against SCO's lawsuit, McBride said, referring to its multibillion-dollar lawsuit against IBM for alleged contractual violations. With that move, the GPL is open to debate, McBride contends.
"We think they're hiding behind a shield made of rice paper," McBride told CRN. "If they put that on the litigation table, there will be collateral damage. But IBM put it on the table."
Many observers predicted that SCO's 8-month-old case against IBM would escalate into a major war over the GPL and the future of software development. The issue, core to the future of proprietary operating system giants such as Microsoft and Sun, and on the other side, open-source backers IBM, Novell and Red Hat, will have significant implications for the entire software industry.
As the battle lines are drawn, McBride acknowledges the scale of the war to come. "It will be the subject of a major debate, but we like our chances by the ruling of the court," a confident McBride said.